Pounding the Rock

by Marc Skelton

Clinton ball. Number 13, the fearless guard who hit the fifteen-footer on the last possession, dribbled smoothly down the court. This time Frankie, our best defender, was in front of him. Tyree converged on him from behind his ropy arm and waited to swat the ball from another ropy arm. With eight seconds on the clock, all three collided around twenty feet from the rim, and somehow the shot went in: 43–40 with the foul. Frankie opened his mouth in disbelief as the court was suddenly filled with disbelieving students from the stands; I saw an emerald-green winter jacket, a pink vest, a young lady in tight blue jeans, a periwinkle hoodie all storm the court. The court looked like a bowl of Fruity Pebbles.

  Walfri put his arm around Tyree in a gesture that resembled a big brother letting the little brother know he messed up.

  The Clinton coaching staff helped remove the fans from the court. Once everyone was settled back into the stands, the younger ref, after conferring with Napolitano, made the T sign with his hand: a technical foul for crowd-control issues. Well, not all refs are created equal. Nonetheless, the Clinton assistant coach was about to lose his head.

  Walfri looked at me and gave the flick-of-the-wrist motion indicating that he would shoot the technicals. I point my finger at Frankie. I am forever choosing sophomores over seniors. Frankie calmly made both free throws. Number 13 missed his free throw. “Forty-five to forty.” Travis conveyed the good news, like a warm samovar used to greet me on cold winter nights in Moldova.

  Our ball. Quick foul. Frankie again made both free throws. As the buzzer sounded, Walfri and Tyree skipped like bighorn sheep across half-court into the celebratory scrum. We had outscored Clinton 25–13 in the fourth quarter to escape the grand Basketball Palace of Knossos with a 47–40 victory. Frankie had 20 points, 5 assists, 7 rebounds, 4 steals, 1 block, and only 1 turnover in the second half. Charles had 9 points, 12 rebounds, and 8 blocks: almost a triple-double. We returned to our makeshift locker room. Undefeated.

  “It’s obvious we need more practice.”

  Tyree, Walfri, and I had all tried a little hero ball tonight, and it failed. Lesson learned. Clearly we are not ready to harpoon any whale, or even a goldfish. But at least we got a Governor tonight. Win number one on the season was also win number two hundred for my career.

  “That was number two hundred,” I whispered to Gaby on our way down the stairs. Gaby was a player when I won my first game against South Bronx Prep in the winter of 2006.

  “Congratulations.”

  As we got outside we shared a quick embrace and he walked the team to the train. The moon hung brightly in the chilly November night sky. To a coach, his team is much more than an after-school activity. Last season, after a loss at Gompers High School, I stood in the cold dark February night feeling worthless, alone, and hungry, staring at the infinite darkness of our skies waiting for a cab. Tonight, the cab could take its time. I was going to enjoy this win.

  * * *

  —

  I get home and my after-game ritual starts: wash the jerseys, enter the stats, upload the game film, eat dinner, read bedtime stories, catch up with Jessica, and go to bed. I lay in bed awake for hours; the residual adrenaline of tonight’s win wouldn’t let go. I got up and walked to the kitchen. I checked my phone and saw a few text messages from Latrell sent at two a.m.

  “No more lies I wanna tell you the truth. I’ve lied a lot over the years because I wasn’t as committed as I should’ve been. I just don’t really like school. I hate going, but I do love basketball and the only way to play that and actually try and pursue that is to go to school. I learned that the hard way. I’m really sorry Coach.”

  For over two years Latrell had done his best to rescue himself each time he self-defenestrated with some elaborate excuse. I remembered wondering if Latrell would make it through this season. Would I have to throw him off? I started scrolling through the timeline of texts from Latrell: Babysitting, grounded. Lies, lies.

  Latrell’s conundrum was solved the next day with his final salvo via text:

  “Coach? I didn’t know how to say this before but…I quit the team. It’s doing too much to my legs. I don’t know what’s wrong with them yet, but it’s been going on for a while. I can’t tolerate the pain anymore and I’ve tried in practice but it just made me look really slow and it hurt too much to push myself. Sorry Coach it was great playing for you. Best Coach anyone could ask for.”

  He would quit by telling everyone he had a painful knee injury and was done for the season. It might even have been true. I was never the wiser to any other reasons he must have quit.

  I couldn’t really celebrate my two hundredth career victory the way I wanted because it was sandwiched between two forwards quitting the team and a longtime assistant coach saying good-bye.

  The next morning, I was physically sore.

  A friendly dad at Nina’s bus stop asked, “Did you guys win last night?”

  “Yes, by seven.”

  Another dad asked, “Who did you play?”

  “DeWitt Clinton.”

  “That makes the Clintons 0-2 this November.”

  I had been an eyewitness to a gritty win, which usually feels pretty good. But there was a pinch in my heart trying to figure out why Latrell and Brandon had defected from the team. I thought back to the guys celebrating. That’s the feeling we chase as coaches. But there is another feeling of pain that is unsettling.

  When I got home from work, Nina had drawn a basketball fairy and decorated it with two hundred stars that spelled “Congrats Papa.” We opened up league play on the Monday after Thanksgiving. We had a week without a game. I wondered if anyone else would quit.

  OUR SCHOOL

  Imagine yourself at a prestigious New Hampshire high school in the spring of 1993. The bucolic campus is in bloom, college acceptance letters are in, and dreams about the future are palpable. The timing is perfect, the senior class is on the cusp of transforming themselves into something new. There are more than two thousand students here, but you feel at home here because it’s a place where everyone knows your name. This type of atmosphere breeds confidence, hope, and magnanimity.

  Now place yourself in a public high school of similar size in the Bronx at the same time. The campus is walled with iron gates and patchy grass, and since most of your friends are not graduating—in fact only about 12 percent of the student body graduates from here—nobody is really thinking about the future. Here you are anonymous. You spend hours in the hallways and most adults ignore you. You cling to your friends because if you’re seen alone you might get jumped. This type of atmosphere breeds confusion, despair, and bitterness.

  In the early 1990s, it became impossible to continue to ignore the failures of the New York City public school system. Perusing the graduation rates, one becomes horrified. Thirty percent. Twenty-two percent. Twelve percent! Desperation forced the city to act. In 1993, Julia Richman High School in Manhattan was closed and was replaced by several smaller high schools. After the Julia Richman High School experiment, then–New York City Schools chancellor Ramon C. Cortines and a team of educators sought to close other large failing high schools throughout the city. He toured the city like a king tours his empire. In Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx he found the same scenario: large groups of students in the hallways, and small circles of students in classrooms with beleaguered teachers behind locked doors. One day while at Monroe High School in the Bronx, the chancellor was attacked by an angry young student.

  When I first heard this story, I immediately thought of the spasmodic teenager Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb who in 1914 assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and the archduke’s wife, Sophie, while they visited disgruntled sections of their own empire. The assassination sparked World War I, ended the Habsburg Empire, and gave birth to nation-states throughout Europe. Similarly, the attack on the chancellor by a resentful teenager, while I bet not as coordinated as that fateful day in Saraj
evo, had a similar effect on another failing institution, New York City public high schools. After the unfortunate if contingent incident, it was clear to Ramon Cortines what school needed to be rescued from the educational abyss.

  You might want to ask, who were the tribunes who allowed anger, hostility, discontent, and apathy to invade urban public education? That is not the right question to ask. School failure didn’t happen on its own. It was the culminating result of decades of neglect, white flight, and poor political decisions. A better question is, how do you avoid anger, hostility, discontent, and apathy in a school? What happened in the early 1990s in New York City, to borrow a phrase from Gershom Scholem, can only be called history’s “plastic hours.” This is “when sentiments of hope spread across the globe.” For a short time, a few people were able to wrestle the failing school template from the educational traditionalists: those who think that the only type of schooling that worked for them should work for everyone. The breakup of large, failing high schools paved the road for a new type of high school in America’s largest city. Many influential people sharpened the blade that cut these failing schools apart, mainly the Coalition of Essential Schools and the Annenberg Foundation, followed by the Gates Foundation. They are responsible for the births of many more small schools, not just in the Bronx, but across the nation.

  Where did the idea come from? Was it the offspring of Debbie Meier’s smaller schools in East Harlem? Was this school the brainchild of the marriage of John Dewey and Horace Mann? Or was it an offspring of Theodore Sizer’s notion that one type of school doesn’t fit all students? Or was it the visionary New York State education commissioner Thomas Sobol’s magnanimous gift that allowed these small schools to be exempt from the New York State Regents Exams?

  In short, yes. They and many others were responsible for improving the lives of students and families across New York. Fannie Lou’s founding principal, Peter Steinberg, and his pioneering teaching staff tried to answer the problem of educating America’s poorest children by bringing forth a school that would know its students and know them well. It was not only an effort to upgrade education in the Bronx, long a spot for neglect, where violence was common and apathy contagious, but a resolve to treat students and their families well. In 1994, the staff at Fannie Lou opened up the doors to the same students who had attended Monroe High School, the second-most-violent school in the city, and changed lives simply by knowing and caring who these children were.

  In the early 2000s, the Bloomberg administration was bullish on expanding the small schools movement. More than two hundred small schools have been created in New York. Many of the same people involved helped build other small schools that did not succeed. Schools are incapable of divorcing themselves from politics. But since some new small schools were unable to rid themselves from their traditional education leanings, they became schizophrenic: small progressive schools in form, but traditional in content. Some of the new smaller schools were thinly disguised as progressive schools. They were set up the same way they always had been and were unable to transcend the bell versus the curriculum (the schedule against what should be taught), the lecture versus discovery, the hands-on experiments versus textbooks.

  Recently, many small schools have been forced to merge with other small schools. I have asked myself many times, how does a school not fold unto itself? Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” Well, Mr. Emerson, the shadow of one woman is responsible for Fannie Lou’s continued success. It is without question Nancy Mann, a founding teacher and the principal of Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School from 2002 to 2014 who actualized and established the school, its curriculum, and its schedule, and who inspired the students. It is also fair to say she raised a lot of teachers, myself included. Nancy Mann is a substitute matriarch for me and many other educators who now themselves operate small schools throughout the city. Like many of my veteran colleagues, we were single when we started working there. We soon married. And now many of us have children, and our children play with one another. Nancy fostered a school where teachers learned how to become teachers, students were no longer anonymous, and families in the Bronx now had an excellent place to send their children to be educated.

  In 1994, as you can imagine, Fannie Lou had some of the most difficult students in New York City. Some of the teenagers, because of educational neglect and interruptions in their schooling, read at a second-grade level. To build a school and for that school to remain successful, certain structures needed to be built. Students would have block scheduling: two-hour classes instead of the traditional forty-two minutes. The school day was streamlined. Math and science, once jealous cousins, would now be dressed alike and taught together, by the same teacher. Literature and history, competing brothers, would now have to share a bunk and be taught by the same teacher.

  Each teacher had an advisory. “Advisory” is a modern take on the vintage homeroom. The advisory classroom is infused with a guarantee that every student in the school will have a teacher who will advocate for them. Someone who knows them well enough to write a glowing college recommendation, triage minor incidents before they become full-blown emergencies, add a different adult voice in their young lives that is nonacademic, offer advice about life or school, or just be someone to talk to. The quotidian dynamics of shuffling all over the building between classes are eliminated. On the top floor, the eleventh graders loop for two years with the same teachers. On the first floor, the ninth and tenth graders stay with the same teachers for two years. Teachers teach a two-year cycle—an arrangement called “mixed-age classrooms.” Students are designated to two or four classrooms, which are referred to as a “house” or “division.” The school was built so caring teachers would know students well. I need to underscore that the two-hour classes and the advisory with the same teachers for two years are designed so that students would spend time with adults and other students whom they grow to trust. Therefore teachers can help children who live on the margins of society build the skills they need to succeed and change their lives.

  There is a charm to the building on 1021 Jennings Street. Picture this: When you walk in, you can hear candidates for student government giving stump speeches in the cafeteria. Walk down the hall. Here you will see Marilyn Byrd’s literature classroom, which traces its origins to a tasteful literary parlor. I like to think this is what an independent bookstore would do if space and overhead weren’t an issue. The walls are a canary blue. There are lamps scattered across the room. The windows have white curtains that breathe rhythmically throughout class, where whispering teenagers, tucked with their books, silently read to themselves. A haunting red and white handmaid’s dress hangs from the ceiling, adding a chilling dystopian accent to the calmness she has otherwise created in her room.

  Move from the serenity of Marilyn’s room to the game show atmosphere of Chloe Prieto and Monique Dozier’s math class. Symmetry abounds. The room is decorated colorfully with student work. Teenagers raise anxious hands hoping to guess the right answers. The math here is serious, yet Chloe and Monique manage to maintain a sense of humor, like a constant function in an algebra problem. There is the perfect amount of levity and numeracy all in one room. In one particularly remarkable example, Chloe sent a struggling student numerous emails and stayed after school multiple days to help him create his own isometric puzzles and prove his own geometric ideas. Overall, students are deeply engaged with the work they are creating, but even the ones who don’t want to work, those who are obstinate and resistant, are going to get harassed, for lack of a better word, by a teacher’s persistence.

  It’s a short walk from math to physics. In Andy Brosoff’s room, students are designing their own roller coasters. They are busy experimenting, predicting, and calibrating the potential and kinetic energy of their own flying death machines. This type of engagement spares the students the boring, tedious, and formulaic approach to physics, where they are
responsible for finding answers to someone else’s problems. Here they have to solve their own problems, for their own ride. Andy is there to remind them about momentum and acceleration, to pay attention to the strict gravitational rules that govern our planet. Andy moves across the room with a propulsive force combined with sheer middle-aged seriousness. The students trust his sincerity, and Andy encourages them to make mistakes. Again, you always see students working, teachers coaching.

  Near Andy’s room is my room. Here we are going to pause for a moment and try to devour history. Before I can convince any student to eat some historical ideas, I need to do some preparation. Some philosophies will need to be defrosted. Others microwaved. Others have expired and need to be discarded.

  The teachers know the emphasis of the school is on the child. The student is the worker; the teacher is the coach. At the same time, if the school is communal, then teaching in the classrooms is wholly individual. A school like Fannie Lou can be looked at as a house with different rooms. The commonality of Marilyn’s reading room, Chloe and Monique’s mathematical game room, and Andy’s garage kids tinkering and making things. My room is a pragmatic kitchen. All share in the essence of an education at Fannie Lou.

  Admittedly, progressive education has its challenges. The advocates for a traditional model and test preparation have a point. There are certainly poems to decipher, mathematical rules to memorize, and historical dates that children need to know. The only problem is, which poems, what mathematical rules, and which dates are mandatory? Let the argument commence.

  High-stakes testing may help prepare children for the other exams in their lives. There will be entrance exams for college and certification tests for future employment. There’s a sense that early-in-life exams groom students to be practiced test-takers and therefore become successful adults. But if children are passively spending hours upon hours silently rehearsing for an exam, they are also spending hours upon hours not dancing, not drawing, and more importantly not playing, debating, or discussing. I have to ask, when are they thinking creatively?